It was never quite that, but that was the theory.
The problem is because it was an exact clone of RHEL, it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to have a proper community around it. Like I said it kind of revolved around "file a bug to Red Hat, wait for someone to pick it up, and then wait more for it to be shipped, which will be months away at best and could be years if it's not a paying customer's priority"
Before that I would pay $49 a year for it.
I totally get why CentOS was useful. I was briefly involved with Rocky when it first was getting started.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2022/07/06/what-quali...
But RHEL is free for limited production purposes also, to a maximum of 16 systems.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/red-hat-introduces-free-rhel-f...
The community is better off with the combination of AlmaLinux + CentOS Stream.
AlmaLinux provides differentiation by supporting hardware and patches that Red Hat doesn't necessarily want to.
CentOS Stream provides a way for all downstream distros (Red Hat, Alma, Oracle, Rocky, whatever) to contribute back to the ecosystem in a way that is deeper than submitting bug reports to bugzilla.redhat.com
The latter point is something people really miss. CentOS was not much of an "open source" project in the same way that Android isn't much of an "open source" project. There was few ways to contribute directly beyond filing a bug report and waiting for Red Hat / Google to handle it. CentOS Stream is vastly more open as a project.